Daily Archives:June 7th, 2014

Post-processing RAW for Fujifilm cameras

One thing for which the Fujifilm cameras (such as my beloved X-Pro1) are known is their impressive on-board JPEG converter, which can produce sufficiently yummy images that many people who would otherwise shoot RAW just stick to JPEG with these devices.

I, however, want to stick with RAW, and I found that getting the best out of it takes rather more initial tweaking with the Fuji cameras than it did, say, with my Canon. I eventually settled on a small boost to the saturation (+13), and quite a large amount of sharpening (+60), and saved that as a Lightroom preset which I now apply as I import any images coming from the X-Pro1.

However, the biggest improvement came, I think, when Adobe Camera Raw (the engine behind Lightroom & Photoshop imports) was upgraded a couple of months ago. One of the easy-to-miss features was the inclusion of Fujifilm camera profiles which mimic the film emulation modes found in the camera. Even when I had upgraded and knew it was there, it was still a little tricky to find, but it’s under the Camera Calibration section of the Develop module:

Lightroom-provia-600

(click for full size)

I’ve found that experimenting with these profiles, and particularly using the VELVIA emulation while reducing my previous saturation setting a little, can bring much more richness to the colours.

When the law is an ass…

Some patent lawyers sent me a few bits of paper this week.

20140605-09321102-600

I reckon there’s well over 1000 pages here, shipped at, I imagine, vast expense all the way from Atlanta to my recycling bin here in Cambridge. The big box in the foreground brought them here. The slim envelope in the background is for returning the half-dozen pages that actually need my signature.

I’m not blaming this particular firm for this foolishness: they are probably obliged to provide me with hard copies by some outdated regulation kept in existence by extensive lobbying from FedEx and Xerox. But you’d think they could find an alternative. Like emailing PDFs. Especially since (a) I don’t need to read them to sign the bits of paper and (b) their client is Google…

Anyway, now you know where the trees have gone.

Progress

awrnNL1_700b

From 9Gag

The race is to the Swift?

swiftI love my Mac and iOS devices, but writing native apps for them has always been made somewhat less pleasurable by the programming languages available. Objective-C (which is behind the typical app on your iPhone or Mac) has its merits, or at least, had its merits when it was designed 30 years ago, but things have moved on quite a lot since then. And don’t get me started on the abomination that is AppleScript…

That’s why, amongst the panoply of geeky goodies that Apple announced at its developer conference this week, the thing that interested me most is their new programming language, Swift, which looks rather lovely. (You can find excellent introductory talks about it here.) It’s early days yet, but may be good enough that, henceforward, people will flock to Apple’s development environment because of, rather than despite, the language.

It’s not clear whether Swift will be available anywhere other than on Apple platforms, and there may be a certain degree of deliberate lock-in here. But that’s better than the old situation where Objective-C was available elsewhere, but nobody really cared.

All of which may help to explain why the book The Swift Programming Language had been downloaded by more than a third of a million people within the first 24 hours of anyone knowing the language even existed.

What Ike was like

This is a splendid article by Val Lauder, about Eisenhower’s personal feelings on the D-Day landings.

When we passed 45 minutes, and he could no longer ignore his aide’s anything-but-subtle glances at his watch, Ike said he would take three more questions. I do not remember the first two. Nor will I ever forget the last one.

Strongly recommended.

My father-in-law was one of the 101st Airborne paratroopers to drop behind the lines.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser